Suspected match-fixing mastermind ran Australian syndicate

ELEANOR HALL: Now to the match fixing scandal at Victoria's Southern Stars Football Club that appears to confirm the warnings from the Federal Government that Australian sports are being infiltrated by global organised crime syndicates.

Victorian Police began investigating the club after a tip off from the Australian Football Federation and have now arrested five players and the coach.

Chris Eaton is a former Interpol officer and one time head of security for the International Football Federation. He now heads the sports integrity unit at the International Centre for Sport Security and is in Australia to assist Victorian police with their investigations.

He told our reporter Katie Hamann that the alleged mastermind, Singaporean Wilson Raj Peramul, has been at the helm of a sophisticated global matching-fixing syndicate for well over a decade.

CHRIS EATON: Peramuls's a very flamboyant guy. He's been operating in match fixing probably for 15 years or more out of Singapore and out of Malaysia. He has been arrested several times in Singapore and sent to jail in fact. He was arrested most recently in 2011 for match fixing in Finland, in Europe. He served one and a half years in prison there.

He's now currently in Hungary assisting police with inquiries there and the prosecution of players and officials from football in Hungary. So if in fact he has been involved in these match fixes in Australia, it's quite shocking really, because he's under police control and he's assisting police in Hungary. Quite amazing that he would be fixing matches in Australia at the same time.

KATIE HAMANN: So how do these sport betting rings work?

CHRIS EATON: Well they work by corrupting young players mostly, or corrupting senior players who are on the way out, if you like. And they use their influence of the younger players to get them to do their bidding - to fix a match in the way in which their gambling is requiring it. The fraudulent gambling that is.

You've got to understand that actually it's the gambling issue here, the sport gambling fraud, that is the primary crime. Not the match fix. The match fix is a means to an end.

KATIE HAMANN: You've said in the past that these betting rings use grey sports books to conduct their transactions. What are these and where do they operate?

CHRIS EATON: They use grey, black and white, in fact. I mean white being the fully regulated and legal bookmakers of the world. Grey are the ones that are under-regulated. They're under-supervised by governments such as the Philippines.

Manila is the home of the three biggest, by far, sports betting operations, but we don't even know who the beneficial owners are of those organisations. We don't even have their annual records. So it's very hard for organisations, police organisations particularly, to drill down to what these guys are doing, and who's using them to, or misusing them.

It might be that they are completely innocent in this. But they don't really care because they turn over so much money. There is an enormous black market out there too, mostly out of mainland China and in the Chinese diasporas. And you see enormous amounts of money, probably actually approximating the same size as these grey markets.

KATIE HAMANN: Do you think it's likely that every Southern Star match has been thrown this season?

CHRIS EATON: If they're corrupting players playing for a single club in a lower division like that, they're looking to fix probably half or a number of those matches in a full season, because they're not making an enormous amount of money out of such a match. They might be making $2 million perhaps, $3 million on a fixed match in such a club.

But when you multiply that by say five or six or seven games in a season, they're doing okay.

KATIE HAMANN: Do you think alarm bells should have rung at Football Federation Australia when Southern Star were suddenly fielding five players from England who were essentially playing for beer money. I mean, what does this say about their governance?

CHRIS EATON: Well I think they actually responded pretty well when they were given information from the sport radar that these matches were suspect and they immediately took action and reported to the police.

Actually, Australia should be proud about this. You've done something that the Europeans have not been able to do, which is to take quick, decisive action. The Victoria Police have been exceptional in this exercise. They have applied organised crime investigation techniques at the get-go. And now they've... six weeks later, taken this thing to full fruition in the first stage. Now that's exceptional and you should be very pleased that the Federation passed it on to the police and the police took immediate action.

So ultimately this is an exercise that you should actually be modelling. And I will be modelling for the rest of the world.

KATIE HAMANN: What does need to happen to stop this problem?

CHRIS EATON: The problem is that localised policing only has limited capacity to do things quickly when you have an essentially global crime - where you have international activity, criminals operating overseas, but also taking the effect of their operation into say Australia for instance.

So what has to happen is there needs to be a global platform of some kind, a cooperative one, which brings together the collective interests of sport, of sport betting, of governments, and of the regulators of the world of gambling.

We need something coherent. At the moment it's all left with localised policing or of national policing and this is not adequate to cope with a globally growing crime which is taking advantage of globally playing football.

ELEANOR HALL: That's Chris Eaton from the International Centre for Sport Security speaking to Katie Hamann.